Hello! I'm a long time member (previously of VPL, then TGL when it went down), but mainly I've kept to myself.
However, today, I have really exciting news to share—My partner, Ryou, and I have been working on our site, Alterico!
It is currently still in active development, with our developer plugging away towards alpha testing, which we are aiming for Late Spring 2021.
Alterico is an upcoming art-focused role play game, otherwise known as ARPG.
Our game is inspired from the many fantastic closed species communities on DeviantArt and Toyhou.se. With the arrival of DeviantArt's Eclipse update last year May, we felt the need to fill this unique niche. There is a community of artists and writers who now feel alienated by the new website layout and feel that it is not working for their group functions, and many have shifted offsite to frameworks such as Lorekeeper or with the use of Discord bots to manage their functionality.
However, I felt that this wasn't enough. What Ryou and I wanted was an experience that was seamless, and did not rely on external services to function. What we needed was a pet site-like interface where players would log in and do everything they need in one place, without needing to reference commands. I'm very grateful to say that we came across a fantastic developer on Reddit who is interested in our project, and we have been working with them for almost a year now. Development began last April in 2020!
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Our Features
In a word... Ambitious? ? Our 1.0 Release is going to contain all of our core functionality, which, when itemized, feels like a lot!
- Character Creation and MYO (Make Your Own) Characters
- Draw artwork to grow your character
- Questing through completing Artwork/Writing tasks
- Ordinates, our common currency, and Leveling Up
- Character Trading and Retiring
- Changing your Character's appearance through our Trait Curio System
- Masterlist Profiles for our character archetypes/species, the Nyaga, Grundelwick and humans
- Gacha elements with our premium currency, Lumenstone and Lumencryst
- Character Rarity based on chosen and earned Traits
- Live Messaging and Persistent Shoutbox
- Full Player Economy and Trading
- Full Mobile Support and Mobile breakpoints for various devices
These core features will be present for our Alpha Testing to ensure that everything is working as intended. Our developer has been working on most of these and has shown them in action, with some key screenshots above for a peek at our layout and UX. Screenshot 1 shows our mobile layout at work!
All of these features come together to focus on the most important part of our game: the player's character. The player will be able to create their own character, either human, Nyaga or Grundelwick, and through drawing their character in various prompts, advance their level and/or change their physical appearance. In the species community, this is usually referred to as Evolving Species. We wanted a deep focus on art, writing and creation as the primary way to advance--Draw more, grow more, change more. We want to foster a community of artists where drawing comes with a great reward, on top of creating great work!
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Who We Are & Challenges We Face
In a market saturated with phone and mobile games, for us to succeed, we have to keep up with technological trends. Even extremely successful games like FlightRising and Dappervolk suffer from the same issue: a degraded mobile experience. It is not enough to have your site 'work' on a phone--it must transform and shape itself to the needs of your audience.
This is why I have put such heavy emphasis on developing a full mobile experience alongside our main site. I (bird, or Asher!) am a Graphic Designer and Print Prepress Technician, and in my short while working in my industry have understood what visually works and what does not. I want the "Nintendo Polish" on our site, where we can truly be something next level. I am also a hobbyist artist, and while I take on the lead designer role for this site, I cannot do all the planning alone. Ryou, my partner in crime, is our designated artwork lead and designer of the Nyaga species. Previously, we have ventured into creating a species group on Deviantart on our own, being one of the first groups to include a dedicated Discord bot to supplement our systems, but I felt that between the two of us, the work was too cumbersome and the experience for our players was not what I wanted. This is when we closed our previous group to return to the starting line for Alterico.
In these tough times, with Covid starting it's third wave where I live, it also may be hard to get donations and help from our fans. We want to wholly give all of our donation gifts to our developer first and foremost, while we supply the copy and artwork between Ryou and I. Our little three man team will try our best to get it done! We plan to have fun and exciting donation perks once we are able to confirm a date for our Alpha Testing.
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Doing Right By Our Player Base
Ryou and I are a team of artists, looking to create a place for artists and writers. We see that this community needs a home, and we want to be that home. We don't claim to be perfect--we are still learning, and frankly I am not always up to date on the newest terminology and news. But important social events and human rights movements do not go unseen by us, and we always acknowledge that our player base is diverse, loving and excited people. We treat our player base with the utmost respect and we simply ask they do the same. It is with this sort of respect and kindness that we hope to perpetuate in our game, with a zero tolerance policy on bigotry and hate.
Keep In Touch With Us!
We would love for all of you great folks on The Gaming List to follow us on our development journey! Our socials are listed above, and all are more than welcome to join our development discord for more sneak peeks.
If there are any questions about what we have planned or about any of the features we have, please comment and I'll field them as best as I can! I know with everyone's support we will make our site a great success.
Thanks for reading!
I've now joined their Discord. Hopefully it goes places! I love the art for it.